It seems like we can’t get enough of Twitter lately. In fact, as the service continues to add new users, the number of applications that help you use it for travel only seems to grow. Recently we learned a quirky new tool called Stweet that links up the street level views found on Google Maps with the power of Twitter.
Although applications like Twittervision already show you a real time map of what and where people are tweeting, Stweet is slightly different. Instead of showing an anonymous map, Stweet pulls the approximate location of where a person submitted their message, attaching it to a street address and visualizing the location using Google’s nifty street view tool. The app can be customized to let you view specific cities like San Francisco or London.
How would someone use this for travel, you might be saying? One potential application might be mapping a city’s potential hangout spots. Guidebooks are great at telling you about good places to go six months ago…but they’re horrible keeping up with the day a visitor happens to be in town. Sure, that cafe in Paris sounded great in your Lonely Planet, but what about this August, when you’re actually around? Twitter is great at picking up trending topics and keywords – Stweet takes that idea to the next level. You can narrow down to specific cities and neighborhoods, seeing the areas that seem to be buzzing and the local topics that have people talking.
That said, an application like Stweet has the power to backfire horribly – the data isn’t necessarily reliable and you can’t necessarily confirm that a given tweeter shares your tastes. It also seems to be struggling with technical difficulties – as of the time of this writing the site seemed to be down. Still, as more and more phones share location data and mobile devices become more powerful, you can bet you’ll be seeing more of these types of services coming soon to a phone near you.
You can find Gadling on Twitter, as well as the most of the Gadling Team: Mike Barish, Kraig Becker, Catherine Bodry, Alison Brick, Justin Glow, Aaron Hotfelder, Tom Johansmeyer, Jeremy Kressmann, Heather Poole, Jamie Rhein, Annie Scott, Karen Walrond, Kent Wien, Brenda Yun.